‘Yes,’ he said placidly.  ’I reckon if you’d had any kind of an education you could ha’ made a quarter of a million dollars easy in those days.  And it’s to be made now if you could see where.  How?  Can you tell me what the capital of the Hudson Bay district’s goin’ to be?  You can’t.  Nor I. Nor yet where the six next new cities is going to arise, I get off here, but if I have my health I’ll be out next summer again—­prospectin’ North.’

Imagine a country where men prospect till they are seventy, with no fear of fever, fly, horse-sickness, or trouble from the natives—­a country where food and water always taste good!  He told me curious things about some fabled gold—­the Eternal Mother-lode—­out in the North, which is to humble the pride of Nome.  And yet, so vast is the Empire, he had never heard the name of Johannesburg!

As the train swung round the shores of Lake Superior the talk swung over to Wheat.  Oh yes, men said, there were mines in the country—­they were only at the beginning of mines—­but that part of the world existed to clean and grade and handle and deliver the Wheat by rail and steamer.  The track was being duplicated by a few hundred miles to keep abreast of the floods of it.  By and by it might be a four-track road.  They were only at the beginning.  Meantime here was the Wheat sprouting, tender green, a foot high, among a hundred sidings where it had spilled from the cars; there were the high-shouldered, tea-caddy grain-elevators to clean, and the hospitals to doctor the Wheat; here was new, gaily painted machinery going forward to reap and bind and thresh the Wheat, and all those car-loads of workmen had been slapping down more sidings against the year’s delivery of the Wheat.

Two towns stand on the shores of the lake less than a mile apart.  What Lloyd’s is to shipping, or the College of Surgeons to medicine, that they are to the Wheat.  Its honour and integrity are in their hands; and they hate each other with the pure, poisonous, passionate hatred which makes towns grow.  If Providence wiped out one of them, the survivor would pine away and die—­a mateless hate-bird.  Some day they must unite, and the question of the composite name they shall then carry already vexes them.  A man there told me that Lake Superior was ’a useful piece of water,’ in that it lay so handy to the C.P.R. tracks.  There is a quiet horror about the Great Lakes which grows as one revisits them.  Fresh water has no right or call to dip over the horizon, pulling down and pushing up the hulls of big steamers; no right to tread the slow, deep-sea dance-step between wrinkled cliffs; nor to roar in on weed and sand beaches between vast headlands that run out for leagues into haze and sea-fog.  Lake Superior is all the same stuff as what towns pay taxes for, but it engulfs and wrecks and drives ashore, like a fully accredited ocean—­a hideous thing to find in the heart of a continent.  Some people go sailing on it for pleasure, and it has produced a breed of sailors who bear the same relation to the salt-water variety as a snake-charmer does to a lion-tamer.